Oral History Interview with Gary L. Noffke, 2010 December 4-5
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Oral history interview with Gary L. Noffke, 2010 December 4-5 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Gary L. Noffke on December 4 and 5, 2010. The interview too place in Farmington, Georgia, and was conducted by Mary Douglas for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Gary L. Noffke has reviewed the transcript and has made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview MARY DOUGLAS: This is Mary Douglas, and I'm interviewing Gary Noffke at the artist's home and studio in Farmington, Georgia, and today is December the fourth, 2010. I'm interviewing for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number 1. So, Gary, I think we could begin at the beginning and ask you to talk a little bit about where you were born and when. GARY L. NOFFKE: Sullivan, Illinois, which is pretty much the center of the state, small town of a little over 3,000 people, pretty much exclusively a farming community. I think there was 90-some kids in my kindergarten class and 90-some kids in my senior class when I graduated from high school. And there's probably still 90-some kids in the senior class there. [They laugh.] MS. DOUGLAS: What year was this? MR. NOFFKE: That — I graduated there in [1961]. So I was born in 1943. MS. DOUGLAS: And what did your parents do for a living? MR. NOFFKE: My father was — worked in a shoe factory most of the time that I remember. I think early on, in the war, he was some kind of guard at an — a Caterpillar plant in Decatur, Illinois, which was, you know, like a large city, almost 100,000 people, and for somebody from Sullivan, that was big. MS. DOUGLAS: Yeah. MR. NOFFKE: My mother was more or less a housewife, homemaker, and she worked later on when I'd graduated from high school. MS. DOUGLAS: Siblings? MR. NOFFKE: One brother, three years older, named Robert. Now lives in Forest City, North Carolina. MS. DOUGLAS: Oh, not too far — MR. NOFFKE: Not too far from you. MS. DOUGLAS: Yeah. MR. NOFFKE: Yeah. MS. DOUGLAS: So what was your grammar school experience like? MR. NOFFKE: Oh, I don't know. I actually always disliked school immensely. I just did not like school. I didn't like sitting in — sitting at a desk for hours. I was happy, happy when school was out all the time — all the time. I was glad it was over. MS. DOUGLAS: That's interesting. MR. NOFFKE: And I never liked school even when I was in college for the most part. I did — I did like being in the studio classes. But if it was a lecture class, I disliked it. It was like sitting in church. MS. DOUGLAS: Well, so — MR. NOFFKE: And so I had a lot of that too when I was going to school. My parents were very religious, and so Sunday — Sundays were wasted days. You couldn't even — you couldn't even enjoy yourself in the afternoon because it was the Lord's day; Sunday night, back to church; Wednesday nights to church. And if there was a revival within 50 miles, we went to that too, and that was every night- for the duration of whatever that was. So couple that with school and somebody that didn't like to sit in a chair — [laughs] — that's pretty much my background. MS. DOUGLAS: Well, did you take any art classes in high school? MR. NOFFKE: We didn't have art classes in school it — at that point; I don't know that they do now for that matter. They probably do, but certainly not then, and none of the teachers had any background in art either. There was — no appreciation. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Booker, was an amateur photographer and she was at — lived down the street from my family, maybe two or three blocks. And I would go down there frequently, and she let me work in her darkroom. I think I have photographs here that she took of me in the fourth grade that I hand-colored. MS. DOUGLAS: What was her — how did you get interested in that — in the photography? MR. NOFFKE: Well, it was just — I don't know. I don't know. It was just something — it was something else, you know. It was — it — you know, even though at that point, photography wasn't considered to be art in any way, shape or form, you know. It was something that interested me, and the process interested me, and seeing her develop film and make prints and so on — I mean, it's sort of — that's fascinating after being in school all day. MS. DOUGLAS: What about — did you draw when you were a kid? MR. NOFFKE: I did — I did a lot. I did a lot of drawing; particularly, I remember the fifth and sixth grade, and I don't recall early on if I — if I did much in the way of drawing, you know, in the lower grades. But I know the sixth grade I remember, I was pretty — I was really bored that year, and I did a lot of drawings of these futuristic cars. I remember doing that, and I don't know where they ever got to; probably got trashed — MS. DOUGLAS: Your drawings? MR. NOFFKE: — but I — I'd love to see those things now [Laughs], you know, the whole Buck Rogers-type things. MS. DOUGLAS: Okay. MR. NOFFKE: And I learned to write backwards. That — those were the two things I did in the sixth grade. MS. DOUGLAS: And what was that about — writing backwards? MR. NOFFKE: Just to pass the time. But I'm — I — I'm still pretty good at it. I mean, I can write backwards almost as fast as I can write forwards in longhand. MS. DOUGLAS: That's interesting. MR. NOFFKE: Every once in a while, I'll get things mixed around. B's and D's are a problem. MS. DOUGLAS: So the fact that you didn't much care for the scholarly activities in school, did you take shop class in high school, that kind of thing? MR. NOFFKE: No, no, I was in — I was in the other — the other curriculum for sort of college prep, you know, with the math, chemistry, physics and those things. MS. DOUGLAS: Did your parents expect you to go to college? MR. NOFFKE: I'd — I think my mother wanted me to go to college. I don't think my father cared. In fact, he probably — he probably didn't like the idea, thinking back, you know. But my mother supported it, and without her, without that support, I wouldn't have been able to do it, I don't think. MS. DOUGLAS: What about your brother? Was he expected — [inaudible]? MR. NOFFKE: He didn't — he didn't go to college. He went to work in the factory my father worked in when he graduated from high school, then left a year later and moved to Chicago in some management job, and sort of all around after that. MS. DOUGLAS: So did you have any other influences in your childhood that would steer you toward a career in art? MR. NOFFKE: Yes. I had a neighbor that I think probably when I was in sixth or seventh grade that — he was a painter. He was an amateur landscape painter, but he was pretty good, you know. He could paint an autumn scene right nicely. [They laugh.] And I was impressed with that. And more so, I was impressed with just the paint and canvas, the media. MS. DOUGLAS: The materials. MR. NOFFKE: The materials seemed to me to be worth something. They had value to them, not money necessarily, but just something worth doing that — so I mean, I was — I was — I was impressed with those paintings, just for the beauty of the material, and also impressed a bit with his ability to paint autumn leaves and things like that —[Laughs] autumn scenes and deer, you know, walking in a forest, those kinds of things, waterfalls — all of the — all of the stuff that you see in cheap art galleries. MS. DOUGLAS: So you were — the town you grew up in, was it rural around the town or — MR. NOFFKE: Yeah, very much so. I mean, there were — there were — the towns of size in that area were Mattoon, which was east of Sullivan; that was 20 miles. That was a town of maybe 40,000 people — 30,000, 40,000 people. Decatur, at that point, was maybe 70,000; it was 25 miles a little bit northwest of Sullivan. Champaign-Urbana was northeast, 50 miles, and we were 200 miles, basically, from Chicago and 170 miles from St. Louis. We were midway between St. Louis and Chicago, pretty much. MS. DOUGLAS: So it was pretty flat there. MR. NOFFKE: It's very flat, yeah — MS. DOUGLAS: Fields. MR. NOFFKE: — that area and lots of corn fields.